If at first your unmanned aerial vehicles don't succeed... try, try again? After a series of unsuccessful tests with the Boeing X-50 Dragonfly and Groen Heliplane, the US government is once again trying to develop a high-speed, vertical takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) aircraft. DARPA just announced the VTOL X-Plane program, a 52-month, $130 million project with one mission: to build an aircraft that can exceed 300 knots, achieve a hover efficiency of 75 percent or better, and hit a cruise lift-to-drag ratio of 10 or more.

In layman's terms, such an aircraft would be faster than a traditional helicopter, but still have better hover efficiency than a modern high-speed 'copter. Sounds like a sensible idea, right? The thing is, DARPA doesn't know yet how such a thing would look: for now, the agency is merely soliciting proposals, with a particular emphasis on smaller, non-traditional companies nimble enough to develop products quickly. So if you've got any good ideas, may as well head on over to the source link, we guess, and try your luck.

It's a story that we hoped we'd never have to report. Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on Earth's Moon, has died at the age of 82 after complications from heart surgery three weeks earlier. His greatest accomplishment very nearly speaks for itself -- along with help from fellow NASA astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, he changed the landscape of space exploration through a set of footprints. It's still important to stress his accomplishments both before and after the historic Apollo 11 flight, though. He was instrumental to the Gemini and X-series test programs in the years before Apollo, and followed his moonshot with roles in teaching aerospace engineering as well as investigating the Apollo 13 and Space Shuttle Challenger incidents. What more can we say? Although he only spent a very small portion of his life beyond Earth's atmosphere, he's still widely considered the greatest space hero in the US, if not the world, and inspired a whole generation of astronauts. We'll miss him.

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Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:45:00 -040021|20309204http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/26/saitek-independent-lcd-interface-boxes-for-flight-sims/%3Futm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%26ncid%3Drss_semi
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/26/saitek-independent-lcd-interface-boxes-for-flight-sims/http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/26/saitek-independent-lcd-interface-boxes-for-flight-sims/%3Futm_source%3DFeed_Classic%26utm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_campaign%3DEngadget%23comments
At E3 earlier this month, Saitek demoed a peripheral sure to spark the interest of many a flight sim enthusiast. Their product, for now with no name, enables flight simulators to display different, customizable information from the "game" on three separate LCDs. Effectively, the displays emulate a real cockpit, where each bit of information comes from a separate module that is integrated into the dash. The device is scheduled for a fall launch, will cost only $99.99, and will be supported in several flight sims beyond the obvious Flight Simulator X -- we're crossing our fingers for X-Plane support.